My Experiences as a Young Trans Woman Engaged in Survival Sex Work

At 16 years old, I began trading sex for money. The money I earned I used to pay for the vital medical care my family couldn’t afford. This essay is not a confession. Neither is my book Redefining Realness. I do not believe that having engaged in the sex trades or being a former sex worker is a confessional matter.

I do not believe using your body — often marginalized people’s only asset, especially in poor, low-income, communities of color — to care after yourself is shameful. What I find shameful is a culture that exiles, stigmatizes and criminalizes those engaged in underground economies like sex work as a means to move past struggle to survival.

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I was 15 the first time I visited Merchant Street, what some would call “the stroll” for trans women involved in street-based sex work. At the time, I had just begun medically transitioning and it was where younger girls, like my friends and myself, would go to hang out, flirt and fool around with guys and socialize with older trans women, the legends of our community.

The majority of the women I idolized engaged in the sex trades at some time or another – some dabbled in video cam work and pornography, others chose street-based work and dancing at strip clubs (an option reserved for those most often perceived as cis). These women were the first trans women I met, and I quickly correlated trans womanhood and sex work.

I perceived the sex trades as a rite of passage, something a trans girl had to do in order to make the money necessary to support herself. I had also learned (from media, our laws and pop culture) that sex work is shameful and degrading.

Sex work is heavily stigmatized, whether one goes into it by choice, coercion or circumstance. Sex workers are often dismissed, causing even the most liberal folk, to dehumanize, devalue and demean women who are engaged in the sex trades. This pervasive dehumanization of women in the sex trades leads many to ignore the silencing, brutality, policing, criminalization and violence sex workers face, even blaming them for being utterly damaged, promiscuous, and unworthy.

So because I learned that sex work is shameful, and I correlated trans womanhood and sex work, I was taught that trans womanhood is shameful. This belief system served as the base of my understanding of self as a trans girl, and I couldn’t separate it from my own body image issues, my sense of self, my internalized shame about being trans, brown, poor, young, woman.

Though I yearned to be among women like myself, I also judged them for doing work that I swore at 15 I could never do. The work and those women didn’t fit my pedestal perched Clair Huxtable portrait of womanhood.

Yet my economic hurdles were real and urgent, and I couldn’t deny that witnessing the women of Merchant Street take their lives into their own hands, empowered me. Watching these women every weekend gathered in sisterhood and community, I learned firsthand about body autonomy, about resilience and agency, about learning to do for yourself in a world that is hostile about your existence.

These women taught me that nothing was wrong with me or my body and that if I wanted they would show me the way, and it was this underground railroad of resources created by low-income, marginalized women, that enabled me when I was 16 to jump in a car with my first regular and choose a pathway to my survival and liberation.

Fifty percent of black, 34% of Latin@, and 16% of Asian trans people have made a living in underground economies, including sex work, compared to 11% of white trans people, according to Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey.

A leading factor that makes young trans women of color, like myself, more likely to engage in survival sex work is economic hardship. Family rejection and hostile, unwelcoming school environments can push a trans girl to leave these spaces, and anti-trans bias coupled with racism and misogyny and a lack of education heightens joblessness.

When you’re 16 years old, dreaming of being yourself and you come from a family that is already struggling economically (not to mention dealing with accepting your identity) and you’re faced with the high cost of gender affirmative healthcare, the hurdles are high and overwhelming, and sex work becomes the most appealing, viable, efficient option. At least it was for me.

Multilayered systemic oppressions are stacked up against trans women from low-income and/or communities of color so the sex trade becomes a road well traveled, helping trans women alleviate financial woes while also making many of us feel desired as women (through an objectifying male gaze), women who are taught that we are undesirable and illegitimate.

There’s no denying that sex work is dangerous work. Engaging in the sex trades increases a person’s risk for criminalization, acquiring HIV or other STIs, sexual abuse and violence. It can also, for myself at least, complicate and conflate your image of self, of love, of sex, of value, not to mention the stigma that is internalized about the work you do, work that often leads others to define you and your character.

My hope is that being open about my experience as a teenage sex worker helps further conversations about how we can better serve folk engaged in sex work as a means of survival, and particularly vital to my community, how we can develop programs that create more appealing and viable options for young trans women, so sex work isn’t their only option for support and survival. We need programs that help trans girls and women find affirming, affordable healthcare and housing options, that shepherd them towards completing their education and that instills in them a sense of possibility.

For many years I thought being trans, that being brown, that being a former sex worker, that being a different kind of woman made me less than and undeserving of being heard. So I silenced those parts of myself that I felt would lead me to further marginalization. I hope now to stand more fully in my truth, and that my decision to be authentic about my experiences gives young women like me, who feel they may not have and didn’t have other choices, the strength to step more fully into who they are.

This essay and my memoir are pivotal steps in my continual process of revealing myself to myself, to those I love and to the world. I believe that sharing our experiences – specifically the ones that we’re told to keep silent, secret and shameful – are the ones that gives us greater access to power.

I am choosing now to step further into my power.

Interested in hearing more voices of folks advocating alongside those engaged in the sex trades? I recommend:

About the author

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16 Comments for My Experiences as a Young Trans Woman Engaged in Survival Sex Work

Julia

Your grace, honesty and beauty has brought me to tears. You empower and inspire.

Dear Janet, thank you for sharing so deeply, so publicly – to educate and move me. Your honest story is compelling and I appreciate it and you. Continued courage & blessings to you, beautiful (from the inside out!) woman!

Amazing article and video…….THANK YOU! I am the father of a wonderful Princess Boy whom is now a young adult. I am now on the board of directors for his LGBTQQI youth organization in Santa Rosa, CA (Positive Images: posimages.org) and will do ANYTHING within my power to support and champion the rights of my TRANS brothers and sisters! We do panels where we speak to classes and trainings and the like to further educate folks on the reality of our community and its diversity and resilience. God BLESS you sister!

I came to know about you only recently (courtesy of Molly & John of the RadioDispatch podcast). Not that you need my or anyone else’s approval but I feel a need to let you know what a positive impression you have made on me. You’re extremely articulate and for lack of a better word, have a “presence” that is quite uncommon. Your “teachable moments” have been stellar without a hint of condescension. No doubt you have made and will continue to make real gains toward the general understanding and acceptance of gender differences. Your book is on my wish list. In fact, if i can hold out, it will be my next purchase after I finish “Dirty Wars” and “The New Jim Crow.”

Janet-Thank you for your profound writing, your touching and authentic descriptions of the trans women who lifted you along your journey, and for giving the world yet another reminder how important it is for everyone to feel seen and heard. I’m starting your book tonight, and can only imagine how much I’m going to appreciate it, so thank you!
With great admiration,
Lori Weinstock, LCSW

Thank you Ms. Mock for your presence and views on what I believe is the “next” frontier in our moving toward 5th Dimension reality where we love who love because…… As a man of color and an admirer + of Trans women, Thank you.

maybe if people didn’t have to scrabble in the dirt to survive because the rich use the power of the state to protect their extortionate behavior there would be no need for trans- people to do this in the first place.

janet, what is your opinion of this extortion of the powerless that we call capitalism?

Hi Janet! I’ve been reading Janice G. Raymond’s book: Not a Choice, Not a Job: Exposing the Myths about Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade, and in it she claims that sex work (all sex work) is violence against women. Would you agree or disagree with that premise and why?

I wholeheartedly do not agree when it comes to women who choose to engage in sex work. Choice and agency is key here and Raymond is beyond problematic here and in addition to her damaging myths about trans women in her work.

Brillant essay! I can’t say I’ve experience any of the things you’ve experienced, but as a woman I completed understand and honor your wanting to survive by any means necessary…you much have been a fierce young woman. I so much appreciate that you’re using your hard travelled road to shine a light on these issues that affects the human race. I hope that others have an easier time in their journey. Thank you.